Shangri-La Paris

Prince Roland Bonaparte, a grand-nephew of Napoleon, moved into this house on the Chaillot hill in 1896, built with the Monte-Carlo casino fortune of his late wife, Marie-Félix Blanc. It held his library and his herbaria, and his daughter Marie watched the young Eiffel Tower from her bedroom. After his death in 1924 the Suez Canal company turned it into flats, with stepped upper floors by 1929, and a state trade body added the top floor in 1966. Shangri-La restored it with the architect Richard Martinet and the designer Pierre-Yves Rochon, opening it in December 2010 as the group's first hotel in Europe. The façades, grand staircase and salons have been a listed historic monument since 2009.

There are 100 rooms and suites, and the window is what separates them. The Superior Room, 36 square metres, looks over the courtyard or the glass cupola, and the Deluxe and Terrace Rooms over the garden or the avenues. The Eiffel View Room, 45 square metres, is the first sold on the tower, and the Terrace Eiffel View Room adds a furnished terrace at 55. The duplex suites named Eiffel look at it through two-storey windows or from a terrace, and La Suite Shangri-La takes the whole panorama from a 100 square metre terrace on the top floor. Rochon's rooms run to blues, ecru, gold and marquetry, with marble bathrooms and heated floors.

The view is the reason to come. The tower stands about 600 metres to the south, across the Seine, and the rooms sold on the view see it at an angle, through tall French windows or from a terrace where breakfast can be served. The floor matters: lower down it rises from about the first platform, above the Avenue de New York roofs and the riverside trees, and the upper-floor terraces see it down to its arches. Downstairs the prince's house does the rest: the grand staircase, Les Salons du Prince in the listed salons, the garden bistro Maison Roland, Cantonese cooking at Shang Palace and Le Bar Botaniste, dressed as a Napoleonic tent. Chi, The Spa fills the old stables with a 17-metre pool under daylight.

The view costs extra and the room names can mislead. On the same February night an Eiffel View Room costs about €3,005 against €1,730 for a Superior Room, which sees no tower, and the suites called Paris View see only part of it. Shang Palace has lost its long-held MICHELIN star. Book it if the tower is the point of the trip, and pay for a room named Eiffel, as high up as you can. Without the view, you are paying palace rates for a courtyard or garden outlook.